Here’s the setup… I’m in the den waiting for someone to arrive and I want to temporarily use my motion sensor to let me know when they show up.

My plan was to define a virtual switch, (arrival switch), tell Alexa to turn on arrival switch and use the front porch motion sensor to notify me with sound wnen someone arrives AND only do this if the virtual arrival switch is on. On my way out of the house I would set my alarm with a routine that always turn off the arrival switch (or I could just have Alexa do it).

I’m sure it can be done wit CORE, but so far I’ve manage to stay away from that. Also, it may be possible with some type of temporary mode switch, but I think that could get messy with my other routines.

Basically I haven’t found a routine that has the necessary “AND” logic…any ideas?

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.”
Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you.
For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. :dog::blush:
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The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

Or, if you have an iPhone, the third-party smart rules app has a really simple graphical interface that let you stack two things for a “do while” set up.

Smartrules is Quick to set up, easy to use, but costs about $10 and is only available for iOS.

Web core is free and very powerful, but quite complicated to set up and use, although there are many community members will be glad to help you if you get stuck.

So it just depends on what your own needs are. You might be able to use the official features by relying on a special mode like “guest expected,” but a lot of people find they end up having to multiply that across multiple conditions, such as “guest expected daytime”, “guest expected night time’” etc., and maintenance overtime can get confusing.

So to answer the question you asked, I think you can just do it with a mode. But to answer the bigger question, I would go ahead and look at either smartrules or web core, whichever you think would suit you better.